At an event organized by Action for Happiness last week I heard Paul Dolan, Professor of Behavioral Science at the London School of Economics, talk about his new book, Happiness by Design(subtitled Change What You Do, Not How You Think for the US market and Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life for the UK market). This book is an entertaining read about how to live a happier life. It’s based on positive psychology yes, but it’s not like the rest of the titles I’ve read. Over the past 10 years or so, I’ve read a few!

For a start, Paul Dolan probably wouldn’t like to have his book classified as a self-help book although that is what it is, albeit with added science. Quoting some little-known research, he was dismissive of this genre and its ability to help anyone become happier, but that’s another story.

Happiness by Design is different. Refreshingly it doesn’t mention three good things, expressing gratitude, savoring, applying your strengths, or any of the staple positive psychology exercises. It does make some basic recommendations, such as spend more time with the people you like and less time watching TV and on the internet, but I’m pretty confident that none of these will be new to regular Positive Psychology News readers. Instead the book starts by questioning why we measure our happiness by evaluating our lives anyway, especially when this method is inaccurate and the stories we tell ourselves often untrue. According to Dolan we’d learn far more about what really makes us happy if we paid more attention to how we feel, moment by moment, day by day.

Dolan tells us to be particularly wary of the stories we create about ourselves, our lives, and our experiences because they can get in the way of greater happiness. It’s not surprising that we’re not as happy as we could be when we focus all our attention on what we think should motivate us and make us happy.

You might keep telling yourself “I’m happy being a working mother,” because all your friends are working mothers, whereas if you paid attention to your experience of being a working mother you’d realize that you’d be far happier at home with the kids. Or perhaps the other way around.

At the event I attended, Action for Happiness director, Mark Williams, volunteered a personal example concerning Facebook. He was an avid Facebook user, getting his fix first thing every morning, until he realized that checking on his friends and adding his own photos and updates wasn’t actually making him happy. If anything the reverse was true. So now he has stopped checking in with Facebook in the morning and feels much happier because of it.

Attending to what makes you happy is vital, primarily because attention is a finite resource. If you’re paying attention to one thing, you cannot pay attention to something else at the same time. So in order to become happier, Dolan advises that we pay more attention to things that make us happy, and less to those that make us unhappy.

Still on the topic of paying attention, Dolan explained the way your hardwired, habitual, unconscious System 1 thinking (the thinking which enables you to function and not be overwhelmed by the gazillions of stimuli you face every day) can be harnessed to create greater happiness.

One way is to shift your deliberative, conscious System 2 thinking about the activities and behaviors that make you happy into System 1 thinking by making them automatic and habitual. Like cleaning your teeth morning and night, activities and behaviors that make you happy can become second nature.

Another way is to use context-focused approaches involving priming, defaults, and commitments to go with the grain, nudging the habitual System 1 thinking into doing what it already does well, but in ways that make you happier. Either way you don’t waste scarce energy, effort, and attention because these actions and behaviors become part of who you are.

Paul Dolan concluded his talk with a discussion of the Pleasure-Purpose Principle. It’s not just whether our experiences are pleasurable that is important here; experiences can also provide us with a sense of purpose. He divides people into two groups, those who are predominately interested in having a good time (‘pleasure machines’), and those who are predominately focused on purposeful experiences (‘purpose engines’).

According to Dolan, having a personal balance of the two types of experiences is what really matters. He suggests that the pleasure machines could increase their happiness by specifically looking to experience more purpose. The purpose engines could increase their happiness by letting their hair down and having a bit of fun every now and again.

So, are you a pleasure machine or a purpose engine? Or have you already learned how to balance the two?

Deciding, Designing, Doing Happiness in 2015

Happiness by Design is not a self-help book with a ready-made or one-size-fits-all answer. Its value is in the way it makes you think about the underlying processes, contexts, and approaches in your life which contribute to or detract from your happiness. As we’re on the verge of the New Year, it may be a good opportunity to consider how you might work with them or change them to design some more happiness into your life in 2015.

Despite a very enjoyable talk from the author, the book is probably not an easy-sell for most practitioners because it introduces a ton of complexity about happiness that other positive psychology books neatly avoid.

Now that I’ve read the book and heard the author explain why he wrote it, one thing is clear. There are a lot more miles to cover and avenues to explore in positive psychology before we get near any kind of agreement on how to increase happiness. During the event’s question and answer session, a woman in the audience asked whether people who are ‘purpose engines’ might ever experience such a thing as a eudaimonic treadmill, similar to the hedonic treadmiss experienced by people who are ‘pleasure machines’. Paul Dolan’s answer was that more research needs to be done.

My own conclusion from reading this book is that the more I learn about human happiness, the more I realize how much I don’t know. Although that might sound odd for a practitioner to say, I quite like being in that position.

Most people ask (or want) the other person to be different. In other words, they look for ways to feel better by getting someone else to give them more love in the form of respect, kindness, or appreciation. Sure it’s easier to love someone who’s nice to you, and yet when you ask others to be different, you actually give away your power. You allow their behavior to determine how happy you will be.

What do happier people do? Instead of searching for how to bring love in, they find reasons to let love flow out.

The Power of Love

When you stop waiting for others to love you and start finding reasons to love them, you are back in your own center of power. Now you control your ability to feel more at peace, more connected, and, ironically, more loved from within.

The power of love is more than just personal happiness (as if that’s not enough). Love grows your business, makes you more productive, and helps you live a longer, healthier life. What’s not to love?

Consider what a renowned psychiatrist and a growth entrepreneur have to say.

After studying two groups of men for more than 60 years, psychiatrist and researcher Dr. George Vaillant learned that love is the most powerful factor in a successful life. Where you went to college is not.

In a desire to cause more love to flow and in honor of Valentine’s Day, I started a Love Week, a week of finding reasons to let even more love flow. Each Day focuses on someone/something to love, priming us with a Love Note, Love Song, and Love Question of the Day. Today is Day 5, although you can start anywhere. Today could be your Day 1.

Days 6 and 7: still to come. Click on Day 5 and then the Next Post link at the bottom.

Birds Taking Flight

Why not let today be the start of more than just a day of love? It doesn’t have to take much time. With just 5 minutes a day, notice how you can expand your love and your power for the next week. For me, it’s made me lighter and freer. I am more centered, playful, loving, and connected to the people in my life.

In a world that emphasizes being smart, sophisticated, and skeptical, it helps to take time to experience what Martin Seligman and Chris Peterson call strengths of the heart. In their research, they’ve found these, including love, to be “more robustly associated with life satisfaction than are the more cerebral strengths…” Even meditating with the intent to create loving kindness for others makes you happier, according to several researchers, including Barbara Fredrickson and Kristin Neff.

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, It’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, And that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.” ~ Dr Seuss

As a practitioner of Nonsense & Gibberish, a deep field where I find and fulfill my purpose of life, I am very interested in understanding the reasons for practicing nonsense and gibberish. What is the impact of applying them in real life, especially when everybody is so anxious about being logical?

It reminds me of my childhood days when I was reading Alice in Wonderland and couldn’t understand the context and its logic. I thought I was completely slow-witted. Many years later having become very experienced in my work as a Laughter Therapist and Nonsense Practitioner, I encountered what Dr. Seuss said about nonsense. It made sense.

A Study on the Impact of Absurdity

So I wondered whether the relaxation of the left hemisphere of the brain through nonsense, talking gibberish, and laughter may have a positive effect on us. Recently I got an answer from new research done at the University of British Columbia that shows how nonsense may sharpen our intellects. Proulx and Heine described having 20 college students read an absurd short story based on The Country Doctor by Franz Kafka. After the story, the students studied a series of 45 strings of 6 to 9 letters, like “X, M, X, R, T, V.” They later took a test on the letter strings, choosing those they thought they had seen before from a list of 60 such strings.

These researchers found that nonsense may unconsciously influence the quality of implicit Learning. The students who read the absurd Story chose about 30 percent more of the letter strings, and were almost twice as accurate in their choices, than a comparison group of 20 students who had read a coherent short story. Heine said, “The fact that the group who read the absurd story identified more letter strings suggests that they were more motivated to look for patterns than the others. And the fact that they were more accurate means, we think, that they’re forming new patterns they wouldn’t be able to form otherwise.”

It looks like practicing nonsense can contribute to our learning skills, improvisation, and power of memory. I am interested in checking the same parameters but instead of reading absurd stories, I plan to have people speak an incomprehensible dialect or gibberish instead.

Gibberish is a verbal-linguistic example of nonsense. Talking gibberish forces you to leave the thought mechanism at rest. Does talking gibberish have a similar impact on learning skills and thinking patterns and how does it affect memory capability?

What Does Gibberish Have to Do with Positive Psychology?

But you may ask yourself, how are nonsense, gibberish, and improvisation related to the premises of positive psychology?

Viktor Frankl wrote,

“… the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

“Pain is inevitable, Suffering is a Choice” (In other words, you can’t control the theater of absurdity in the external world, but you still you have choices about how to react to it: to be a victim or to fulfill a meaningful life.)

Life circumstances sometimes bring surprises, even black swans, in the words of the Lebanese economist Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who writes about events that are so unlikely that they seem impossible, and yet they still occur. When they do, they can shock us, with either a negative or positive effect. But Frankl also wrote that in each situation, absurd though it may be, even a disaster, one still has the freedom to find his own purpose of life which is higher than himself. He then says “He knows the ‘why’ for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any ‘how’.” Purpose in life may be “a human being who affectionately waits for him, or an unfinished work.”

Frankl’s “how” may be the nonsense, absurdity, and gibberish that actually happen in real life. Sometimes events like the Holocaust drive people very far from the lives they want to live, but still they have the freedom to find a purpose of life and hence an inner satisfaction, albeit with less happiness.

According Baumeister and colleagues, happiness without meaning characterizes “a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided.” Frankl suggests that the very pursuit of happiness may take us away from it, since we may be left within our comfort zones having enough money, food, and daily pleasures that we aren’t driven to fulfill our purpose of life. But then the tsunami may shock us.

Research by Baumeister and colleagues at Stanford University on 400 Americans provides new insights into meaning and happiness, including snapshots of both the happy and meaningless life and the unhappy but meaningful life.

“Put another way, humans may resemble many other creatures in their striving for happiness, but the quest for meaning is a key part of what makes us human, and uniquely so.
~ Baumeister, Vohs, Aaker, & Garbinsky

One of my thoughts after reading this paper is that having negative events happen to you illogically is reflected in the chaotic pattern of gibberish, where the words and context lose any meaning. These events decrease your happiness, that is, the satisfaction of basic needs and desires, living an easygoing life, and avoiding difficult entanglements. But being able to cope with them can increase the amount of meaning and associated satisfaction you have in life.

A study by Mauss and colleagues in 2011 confirmed this finding and found that people who have meaning in their lives in the form of a clearly defined purpose rate their satisfaction with life higher even when they were feeling bad compared with than those who did not have a clearly defined purpose. See the article by Emily Esfahani Smith for more on Viktor Frankl and the importance of meaning in life.

Is it possible that even for events as horrible as the Holocaust, we can train ourselves not to take the external world so seriously and to see meaning in life beyond the self? Viktor Frankl was in favor of using paradox and humor in challenging situations. He used these approaches in his clinical practice and even named one of his treatments Paradoxical Intention. Another therapist, Frank Farelly, invented Provocative Therapy, which advocates radical (and sometimes humorous) therapeutic moves intended to jolt the client out of his current mindset.

Perhaps the first step toward finding a purpose of life and fulfilling a personal life mission is to accept what reality brings, to live peacefully with the paradoxical nature of reality. Living peacefully with the absurd, the Existential Nonsense Theater of reality, where black swans show up from time to time is enhanced by existential laughter. Learning not to take them too seriously is the first step to cope with life challenges and even tsunamis.

The second step may be to recognize that adversity is part of finding purpose in life. According to a Jewish proverb, “Man Plans, God Laughs.” But when we are too enrolled in reason, it is quite hard for us to accept surprises, especially when we are addicted to staying in the comfort zone where we are surrounded by daily hedonic pleasures.

Practice Speaking Irrationally

Gibberish, the language that reflects absurdity and nonsense, allows us to speak irrationally and not to fight to understand everything. This is the only way of communication that can leave the mind and the “chattering box” at rest.

With gibberish, anyone can say anything without being wrong or judged. The only law that applies here is that “Anything goes.” Some say this language is named after the Middle Eastern alchemist from the 8th century Ibn Jabir, because his highly technical speech sounded like… gibberish.

Can practicing gibberish exercises, over and over again help us accept real life as it is by helping us play with nonsensical events instead of being victimized by them? Can it help us be better prepared for future surprises that can shock us? Can practicing nonsense help us to find our own meaning and purpose in life? If we understand from within that the external world is, by its nature, full of absurdities and contradiction, we can make choices to express meaningful purpose in our lives instead of following a nihilistic way of self-neglect and pessimism. Perhaps we could say, “If we plan, but God laughs, let’s laugh with him.”

I would love to explore scientifically those questions:

Does acceptance of the existential absurdity help us find meaning in life?

My background is originally in music, but for the last 5 years or so, I have been focused on psychology. Lately, I’ve been getting music work from old friends who’ve asked me to write demos, soundtracks, and songs. Revisiting musical work with my newly acquired positive psychology mindset has made me wonder again about why we humans love music so much.

The P in Seligman’s theory of PERMA stands for positive emotion. It’s something that we are motivated to experience in and of itself.

However, one particular question came up for me as I perused my music collection. Much of what I enjoyed and appreciated listening to was actually in a minor key, often in a key intended to induce sadness.

Why would I gravitate toward experiencing a negative emotion such as sadness? On top of this, much of the music that I write is in a minor key and generally explores the depth of an emotion. Getting back into writing music has reminded me how differently I feel after a day filled with such emotional work. For lack of a more scientific term, I call it feeling grounded.

Exploring the Connection Between Music and Emotion

In a 2009 experiment performed at McGill University, researchers asked the question: what exactly is rewarding about listening to music? Participants brought in music that they found consistently pleasurable, defined by giving them chills each time they listened to it. They also listened to excerpts from other participants’ music (as a neutral control). The music ranged in genre from Beethoven to Pink Floyd. The research team captured a battery of physiological measures in real-time as well as the participant’s subjective rating of how pleasurable they found the music. Participants also rated what they thought the excerpts of music were intended to elicit.

The researchers found that the valence of the music (whether listeners perceived the music as happy or sad) had no bearing on how pleasurable the listeners found the music. What seemed to matter was whether the participant experienced emotional arousal of some sort.

The experimenters clarified that not all highly aroused emotional states are pleasurable. Musical excerpts arousing unpleasant feelings, such as anxiety or fear, were omitted. Unfortunately, the authors did not include much detail on the emotions that the music did appear to elicit aside from sadness.

One theory is that music and art cause “shadow emotions”, a term often used for experiences that are separate from true emotions and occur in places perceived to be safe. It may be that this type of pleasure experience combined with emotional arousal is specific to music or art. But I think it points out that we still have a long way to go to understand the complexity of human emotion.

The topic of positive emotions is central to any serious discussion of positive psychology. This morning my MAPP colleague Andy Roberts called me about a piece of work he’s doing on creativity and entrepreneurship. We brainstormed a bunch of ideas and concluded that positive emotions should take a starring role in his project. I’m lecturing on positive psychology and leadership to Business Psychology students at London Metropolitan University next month, and yes, positive emotions will feature there too.

Simple Pleasures

Where Do Positive Emotions Fit In?

Positive emotions are a vital part of well-being. Most positive psychologists aren’t willing to state that any one specific route to well-being is more important than another. Instead the message we give those seeking to increase well-being is that there are different routes. In fact, there are a different number of routes, depending which well-being model you favor. Seligman’s PERMA model has five factors, Ryff’s Psychological Well-being model has six, and so on. The most we can say for the time being is that it’s an individual thing. What works for your well-being may be different from what works for mine.

Nevertheless, despite Barbara Fredrickson’s decades of research into the evolutionary purpose of positive emotions, I think the topic often gets a rough ride. Positive emotions remain a poor relation in the well-being family, tending to have less gravitas than other factors.

Coffee with decorative pattern

One reason may be that positive emotions are often equated with hedonic pleasure. Whether we agree or not, the factors linked to eudaimonic well-being tend to be taken more seriously than those linked to hedonic well-being.

Take Seligman’s earlier Authentic Happiness model. There is an implied hierarchy: living a Meaningful Life is better than living a Good Life which is better than living a Pleasant Life, and living all three together (the Full Life) is best of all. It’s not surprising that positive emotions are often seen as fluffy.

Different Kinds of Pleasure

So it was with great curiosity that I stumbled across a philosophical approach to pleasure that suggests that there is more to the hedonic life than initially meets the eye. Epicurus distinguished between two types of pleasures:

Kinetic pleasures are those which initially give you positive emotion, but eventually, if you continue to pursue them, lead to negative emotion somewhere down the line. They start by feeling good, but they eventually destabilize and unsettle you. These are what Dr Will Buckingham of De Montfort University, Leicester, describes as the ‘sex, drugs and rock n roll’ of pleasure. When we say “You can have too much of a good thing,” it’s kinetic pleasure that we’re talking about.

In contrast to this, we have

Static pleasures (or to give them their correct term, katastematic pleasures), which Buckingham says do not have a destabilizing effect. In fact they encourage calm and tranquility. He suggests watching the setting sun, enjoying another’s friendship, or eating simple food are static pleasures. You can never have too much of them. They continue to give you positive emotion.

This distinction between kinetic and static pleasures suggests that in the well-being stakes, not all positive emotions are equal. Perhaps we should limit our exposure to the former, while encouraging more of the latter.

Diener and colleagues suggest that it’s not the intensity of positive emotion that is important for well-being, but the frequency. Thus experiencing frequent but low-level positive emotion is better for well-being than going for the Occasional Big One. In other words, it appears that it’s better to aim for rather modest contentment than all-out bliss! This seems to fit with Buckingham’s description of the effects of kinetic and static pleasures.

Walking dogs AND a view

What is Your Mix?

Do you know which of your favorite pleasures are kinetic or static, for example, or whether you lean more towards one type of pleasure over the other?

This weekend, I asked a group of friends to list the things they do for pleasure. Most started by listing obvious kinetic pleasures. Variants of ‘shopping, sun, sangria’ appeared with remarkable frequency. It took much more prompting and reflection to come up with a list of static pleasures, including doing the church flowers, walking the dog on the beach, and making and eating home-baked cakes. It was almost as if they didn’t want to own up to such simple pleasures. I think it’s fair to say that most of them underestimated the well-being benefits they could gain from them.

Writing a list of all the pleasures you enjoy, then reflecting on which ones are kinetic and which static might give useful insight into your true sources of well-being, and perhaps suggest pathways to longer-lasting positive emotion. On my return home, I immediately got out my version of Frisch’s playlist (i.e. all the things I do for pure fun, relaxation, and pleasure) and labeled each item kinetic or static. I won’t tell you which came out tops!

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